Kartotherian

Kartotherian is a vector tile server based on open-source Mapbox stack, developed by Wikimedia Foundation for use on Wikipedia. It is horizontally scalable and designed for high loads.

Architecture

Kartotherian is a set of 3 services:

Kartotherian - tile server itself.

Tilerator - tile rendering queue.

Tilerator-UI (optional) - UI for issuing commands to Tilerator.

While Kartotherian can be configured to generate tiles on the fly straight from PostgreSQL, this is intended for development use only and the main mode of operation is to convert vector tiles generated by Tilerator into whatever user-requested format. An HTTP cache such as Varnish is recommended for reducing load on Kartotherian.

Styles

Standard CartoCSS styles are supported. A fork of Mapbox's osm-bright2 has been developed for use by Wikimedia.